Such true believers, according to Luther’s teaching, are so much the sole representatives of the visible Church that the wicked, the unbelieving, the hypocritical Christians who only expose her to the scorn and derision of her foes, do not really belong to the Church at all.[1108] They are members of the Church merely in name, but, in reality, are not Christians at all.[1109] It was not, however, easy for him to shake off the true feeling he had inherited from youthful days, viz. that whoever wished to be pious and pleasing to God, must become so through the true Church. “Let us therefore pray in the Church,” so we hear him say, “let us pray with the Church and for her.”[1110] According to him the Church was the ghostly Eve taken from the side of Christ, a pure virgin and one body with Christ, great and splendid in God’s sight, the chief of His works, dear to Him, precious and highly esteemed in His sight, etc.[1111] Hence we find him re-echoing the beautiful words in which Catholic mystics had been wont to extol the Church and her “soul.” Yet there is no doubt, that, in spite of all this, Luther had explained away the Church’s very essence. It was indeed his tendency to spiritualise, and his favourite idea that true believers must be enlightened by God directly concerning His outward “Word” that helped him thus to explain away the Church. As for any outward doctrinal establishment or institutional Church having an authority of her own, no such thing existed. Thus the Church which Luther extols as so holy turns out to be something quite intangible—water that for want of a holder runs away and is lost. Even Köstlin admits this, though in guarded words: “Certain main problems which the Reformed view of the Church must necessarily face” “were only very insufficiently grasped and discussed” by Luther and his friends. Among such questions Köstlin includes some that touch the Church’s very essence: How far is purity of doctrine necessary in order to belong to the Church; how far are the old Creeds still professed by Protestantism obligatory or binding upon preachers; where, finally, does the freedom preached by Luther precisely end?[1112] But, in spite of all the _lacunæ_ in his doctrine of the Church, Luther bitterly insists, that, outside the Church there can be no salvation.[1113] Nor did he even admit the usual Catholic limitation, viz. that those, who through no fault of their own are ignorant of the Church, may possibly be saved if their life has been otherwise good. Luther indeed, as already shown (p. 292), is of opinion that some olden Catholics may have been saved, if, in the end, they laid hold on Christ as Luther taught;[1114] he also opines that salvation had been brought to all “worthy men of every nation” who had died before the coming of Christ, through His preaching during His visit to Limbo;[1115] yet he does not believe that it was the Will of God that _all_ men, whether within or outside the Church, should be saved.[1116]